Striding rapidly, Strom Thurmond headed toward a cluster of legislators at
the edge of the racecourse for the Carolina Cup. The spring steeplechase
serves as a huge outdoor cocktail party for Camden's Yankee "horsy set" and
South Carolina's social elite. It was the year Thurmond turned seventy,
fathered his first son, and ran for his fourth term in the Senate. A
seasoned political reporter, standing beside the legislators and holding a
cup of boozy good cheer, spotted the senator heading their way.

Directly in Thurmond's path sat a large pile of fresh horse manure. As he
neared the clump of still-moist droppings, he established eye contact with
the group. Watching closely, the reporter suppressed the flicker of a wicked
smile. At the last moment, without looking down or breaking his stride,
Thurmond deftly sidestepped, greeted the men, and vigorously shook their
hands.

For reporter Kent Krell, a native of England with an appreciative eye for
his adopted state's eccentricities, the scene remained vivid a quarter
century later as an image of Strom Thurmond's finely calibrated political
antennae and his innate capacity to both sniff danger and move adroitly to
avoid it.

With his dyed orange-red hair transplants and shambling gait, Thurmond in
his mid-nineties daily sets records as the United States Senate's oldest and
longest-serving member. He may seem to the knowledgeable observer in New
York or Washington as an old seg and irrelevant relic. But in his native
South Carolina, whose voters returned him to the Senate in 1996 for an
eighth six-year term that will end just after his 100th birthday, ol' Strom
retains a larger-than-life mystique.

There's Strom the politician and there's Strom the searing individualist.
Like the fruit in a blueberry and peach cobbler, the two combine inseparably
to make him America's most enduring twentieth century political figure. The
tales of "colored offspring," his penchant for young wives, and a legend for
lechery provide a larger-than-life overlay of ribald rascality. But ordinary
citizens love him. He speaks the common man's language. He is the rare
politician who seems to relate to and care about everyday people. Strom is
the master of retail politics.

"He took small county politics and applied it on a statewide basis,"
explained Butler Derrick, a Democrat who served twenty years in Congress
with Thurmond and grew up in his hometown of Edgefield. "He's always ready
to help someone. Politics is a matter of addition, not subtraction, and he's
the one who wrote the rule on that."

Thurmond's political legacy is found not in the annals of legislative
achievement, but in redefining America's political culture. As the
segregationist Dixiecrat candidate for president in 1948, he won four Deep
South states and shook the foundations of the Democratic "solid South." This
psychological break opened the path for two-party development in the region.
Elected to the Senate in 1954 in an unprecedented write-in campaign, he
switched parties ten years later to campaign across the South for
presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. This symbolic act, after Goldwater
voted against the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, for the first time
helped attract large numbers of the most racially conscious white
Southerners into the GOP. It helped lay the foundation for a race-flavored
"Southern strategy" that altered the character of the party of Abraham
Lincoln.

In 1968 Thurmond became kingmaker for Richard Nixon, first holding the South
for him against Ronald Reagan to win the nomination for president at the
Republican national convention, and then in thwarting Alabama Gov. George
Wallace's third-party drive. Thurmond already had led the charge that
blocked Justice Abe Fortas from becoming Chief Justice after Earl Warren. As
Thurmond foresaw, President Nixon's appointments to the Supreme Court would
begin its movement to the right.

Once when a speechwriter used the word "afraid," Strom handed the text back
to him with the comment, "I've never been afraid of anything." His record in
both military and political combat proves it.

In electoral politics, Thurmond is the proven master. As a child he learned
how to shake hands from the legendary race-baiter Pitchfork Ben Tillman.
He's done it so long and so often in South Carolina that he is able to
detect a glint of recognition in someone's eyes and greet them with "So good
to see you again." The ordinary citizen thinks, "He remembered me."

His political mastery, however, is based not on show, but substance. The
four corners of its foundation are: (1) political boldness, which reflects
both courage and an unsurpassed instinct for timing; (2) a refusal to keep
an enemy, which dissipates opposition; (3) a willingness to take a firm
stand on issues, which generates respect; and (4) a record of legendary
constituent service, which creates goodwill.

Thurmond's effrontery at pork barrel politics is almost breathtaking. After
voting against almost all federal legislation aimed at improving health
care, education, housing, and other domestic spending programs not involving
the military, Thurmond sought every federal dollar he could get for South
Carolina, with a press release seeking credit for every grant made to the
state.

For Thurmond, politics represents total commitment that's part of his being.
Ordinary citizens trust him. A textile worker in overalls once explained he
would vote for Thurmond "because he stands up for what he believes in - even
when he's wrong."

Thurmond's political foundation is reinforced by a quiet and simple
religious faith, values rooted in family pride and loyalty, and a fierce
determination to win that is reflected in a lifelong passion for physical
fitness. On his sixty-fifth birthday, he performed before a group of
reporters in his Senate office, doing a hundred push-ups.

Until Gov. George Wallace of Alabama came along, no one symbolized
resistance to civil rights for African-Americans more than Thurmond. In the
Senate the former Dixiecrat set a filibuster record against the 1957 Civil
Rights Act. That record still stands. But when the tide of changing
constitutional law forced the American South to abandon the state-enforced
system of rigid racial segregation that served as the model for South
Africa, Southerners changed their behavior. Changes in attitude followed.
Strom Thurmond moved with the tide.

He abandoned his ship of "states rights" opposition to civil rights progress
and swam into the mainstream. He voted in 1982 to extend the Voting Rights
Act he had bitterly opposed. He became a champion of traditionally black
colleges. He supported legislation to make the birthday of Martin Luther
King, Jr., a national holiday. He reached out, politically and personally,
to blacks in South Carolina, recognizing that they too had become
constituents who should get service from his office. And he recognized most
of all that blacks now voted.

Thurmond treats the public's money like it's his own. When he became
chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Thurmond personally approved
every expenditure of funds - down to buying a box of pencils.

Dennis Shedd, his trusted staff director who became a federal trial judge,
never forgot his first presentation as a young staffer in Thurmond's Senate
office. Shedd had carefully read and absorbed an in-depth, four-page article
in a Sunday issue of the Washington Post that analyzed complex issues about
nuclear energy. When he came in Monday morning, Thurmond asked him to read
the article, written by a noted scientist, and brief him. Shedd saw it as an
opportunity to display his brilliance.

A few minutes later he told Thurmond he was ready, and the senator said to
go ahead. After less than thirty seconds, Thurmond stopped him and asked,
"Is he for it or against it?"

Shedd explains, "He just wanted to know if the man was for nuclear energy or
against it. I learned a very important lesson."

When he became top aide, Shedd told other staffers that in briefing the
senator they needed to be prepared to do it in fifteen seconds. "I told
them, 'If you can't tell him in fifteen seconds, you don't understand it
well enough yet. And if he wants to hear more, or ask questions, be prepared
to talk for up to an hour.'"

Miss Hortense Woodson, for decades the keeper of the flame of local history
in Strom's hometown of Edgefield, knew him since he was a little boy coming
into church with his father and his mother. "He hasn't changed," she once
told a writer for The New York Times Magazine. "Everything he's done has
been done to the full. There's no halfway doings about Strom."

So, what's Thurmond's weakness, his character flaw? The biblical book of
Ecclesiastes may have had Strom in mind with its observation: "Vanity,
vanity, all is vanity." He often appears "out of it" because, as one former
aide explained, he's too vain to wear a hearing aid. Thurmond tells
witnesses who sit too far from the microphone at Senate committee hearings,
"Talk into the machine. Talk into the machine."

At Clemson University, Strom's alma mater, the floor of an entire building
is dedicated to the Strom Thurmond collection. A former staffer in his
Senate office said that "everything - even napkins from a reception" are
collected and sent to Clemson.

Full-time archivists organize the material - speeches, correspondence,
newspaper and magazine articles, and endless photographs. During months of
cataloging photographs, an archivist said that eleven cubic feet of them
were discarded.

In South Carolina his name seems everywhere - buildings, highways, a lake.
And more.

The marker over the grave of his universally admired first wife, Jean Crouch
Thurmond, includes two long lines, engraved in granite, that identify her
as: